He Must Increase

Ref. John 3:26-36.

Traffic on this blog has declined over the past week. Does it mean anything? Only in certain contexts; by itself it could be that everyone is simply too busy with other things. Surely you know by now I don’t take such things personally. As with Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist, I am no more than a herald announcing the coming wrath of God. If the message has lodged in your heart, then you shouldn’t need my narrative much longer. It becomes a mere matter of having the time and inclination to stay connected to me personally. The message is far more important to me — He must increase in your heart and I must become smaller.

Given the context of national economies and various stock markets declining, maybe the decline in blog hits does mean something. For sure, if that economic decline goes much farther, many of you will have less time for my blather. Some of you simply won’t have the same level of access as before. That’s how it works with a declining economy. You might be fine personally with keeping up the payments on everything, but the people who provide what you buy may be struggling to stay in business. That’s what a slow collapse looks like: The underlying system itself thins out. In some places, it becomes thin enough that businesses simply close because they are based on minimal operating margins that depend entirely on a high volume of traffic.

So I expect many of us will need to adjust our habits and tastes to focus more on what’s available locally. In general, the big box stores close down and little shops rise up in their place, but with an entirely different set of wares. It’s likely enough to support life, but not what you are used to having. Then again, maybe you live in a place where the population and traffic is so dense that you hardly notice. People write whole books on the generalities but only God knows what you’ll face as an individual.

In the past week or so, along with that decline in daily hits here, I’ve seen a matching rise in personal moral peace. It’s the kind of thing you can’t explain in clinical terms. I find it something on a different level, not simply more of the same. Yet I also believe it was always there and simply outside my awareness. You can’t very well use what you don’t know about. It registered on me when I tried to talk about the effects, both in writing and in conversation. It’s a better grip on shalom, being held tighter in its grip.

Part of that is a better facility for telling you where I find shalom in various contexts. That sense of peace and moral consistency is easier to discern in every context. A primary symptom is that no one’s fussing and griping at me is the least unsettling to me. It’s just water off a duck’s back; maybe you can’t imagine what a might miracle that is for me. Some mistake it for arrogance, but it’s just that I know where to find that inner peace and I simply don’t have to defend myself any more to anyone. I have an inclination to explain, but too often I sense the door is too tightly closed and don’t waste my breath.

It’s a whole lot bigger than just sensing life around me in the immediate environment. It’s something that touches the essence of existence itself. I still hear the singing celebration of various parts of Creation around me, but this is a call to my soul on a totally different wavelength.

I want that for you. I want it so much that I’ll be glad to help you get it from other sources than me. I pray each of you are touched as I am and turned to the most local of all sources, yet at the same time the most global of all sources: The Creator Himself in you.